Consultation and sales in connection with electronics assembly systems have, in the past, been constrained by the absence of tools and methods that would allow the consultant or salesperson to generate meaningful customer options within the course of a single meeting. The available approaches, if any, simply would not enable a consultant or salesperson to propose an electronics assembly system configuration to a customer, and generate a well-founded performance prediction, in real time or on the fly, and, therefore, not within the course of a particular customer visit. Either the performance prediction would be based merely upon the consultant's or salesperson's experience-based educated guess—hardly a scientific or optimal basis for a customer making a major investment decision—or it would require the generation and running of a model that could take days or weeks to prepare and even longer to yield a meaningful result.
Methods and tools do exist for modeling and simulating production and assembly lines, but they have been unable to support the goals achieved by the present invention. A spreadsheet such as Microsoft Excel® 98, for example, can be used to perform static modeling of an assembly line. While spreadsheets are relatively easy to use and may provide results based on static modeling, they do not adequately take into account how various factors interact with each other. A spreadsheet can be configured to show that certain pieces of equipment in an assembly line may have a downtime of 25%, but it cannot be configured adequately to show that at various times, all of these pieces of equipment might be down at the same time, much less predict the actual impact such an event might have on assembly system performance.
Discrete event simulation software products, such as Witness® 2000 (available from Lanner Group, Greenwich England), can provide better estimates of how a line may actually operate. One drawback of using existing discrete event simulation products, however, is the amount of time and skill they demand to set up a simulation of an actual or proposed system. Most discrete event simulation packages require that highly detailed simulation objects be created by the person performing the modeling. These objects contain numerous parameters, some of which may be variable in nature and some of which are inherent in the piece of equipment that the simulation object represents.
Consultants typically spend a great deal of time, sometimes several weeks, building a discrete event simulation model. A simulation requiring such a protracted set up process is of little value to a salesperson pitching equipment, or to a consultant trying to demonstrate ways of increasing an assembly system's efficiency during the course of a customer visit. It would be preferable if a consultant or a salesperson attempting to sell products or services were equipped to deliver a persuasive, well-supported sales pitch, or needed consultation in far less time.
Prior to the present invention, there appears to have been no adequate way for a consultant to quickly and easily build and run a simulation model for a proposed electronics assembly system configuration. Moreover, the level of skill required to build a simulation may exceed the skill level of a typical salesperson. It would therefore be valuable to have tools and methods that: demand only a low level of skill to use, similar to that required to use a spreadsheet; can be quickly programmed; and can yield accurate results—similar to those of a sophisticated discrete event simulation modeling tool. Such tools and methods would help make possible new and more time-efficient approaches to consulting and sales involving electronics assembly equipment.